Tammy Nguyen
Angel with nails on Mount Purgatory

Tammy Nguyen’s painting series A Comedy for Mortals: Inferno carefully considers the ways that language and narrative construct areas of moral ambiguity or ethical confusion across thirteen paintings. She envisions these sociocultural gray areas as potential thresholds leading to paradigm shifts, and she often models characters who might usher in these moments of transformation. In the painting Angel with nails on Mount Purgatory Tammy Nguyen draws a parallel between two distinct narratives, separated by centuries but united in their mania to map the furthest reaches of the celestial universe: Virgil and Dante’s religious pilgrimage through the nine rings of hell and the secular Race for Space that defined Cold War-Era politics. Having studied Vietnamese lacquer painting, this work reflects influences of this traditional technique in their remarkable flatness, colored grounds, and rich, intricately layered composition. In the painting, Nguyen renders both fictional and historical characters from each story in an overlapping fashion, charting their journeys across a sea of interconnected icons, partially obscured text, abstract patterns, and figurative imagery. Through layering, manipulation of image and text, and other painterly techniques, Nguyen’s work aims to unsettle, and highlight the tension between the so-called mainstream value, belief, and histories, and invites us to question the readily available realities. The dissonance and disorientation her images activate in the viewer become generative, opening space for reevaluation, radical thinking, and dislodging complacency. Drawing spatial and literary parallels between two historical narratives that shaped contemporary Western worldview, Nguyen paints the ascent into space as equivalent to the descent into hell—a reversal that extends her lines of questioning into an array of larger concerns, including colonialism, religion, violence, and environmentalism.
A storyteller, Tammy Nguyen creates paintings, drawings, artist books, prints, and zines that explore the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and lesser-known histories. Her traditional painting and drawing practice are enriched and complimented by her publishing practice, embodied through her imprint, Passenger Pigeon Press, which creates and distributes Martha’s Quarterly, a subscription of artist’s books and interdisciplinary collaborations. Throughout Nguyen’s work she has explored a range of topics and ideas, showing her long-term research on specific yet troubled histories with deep awareness on interconnectedness and transnational sensibility. At its core, Nguyen's collaborative, research-based practice is propositional, exploring ideas and conjectures for ways of looking at the past, examining the present, and imagining possible futures. Across her work, Nguyen addresses the question of how one sees and reads, both visually and linguistically, and she considers the idea of multiple narratives being told simultaneously, held together by the edges of her compositions or spines of her books.